Chapter 6: Blood Monkey
Anger
It wasn’t often that Janet’s personnel saw her get mad. The very first time it happened was almost a year ago, when Dee the zoo cage cleaner had decided to leave the project. “It’s too much for me,” she told Janet. They could hear Dee was on the verge of tears. “I just can’t do it to him.” That was before she had made up the excuse about going off to swim with whales.
Janet hadn’t screamed at the time or shown any visible anger. That probably would have made it easier for the people at the office to deal with. No, she had simply kept silent for an entire week instead, and being around her became almost unbearable. Even Ethel Goodleigh found it difficult to tolerate, but she knew it was because there was so much at stake. The loss of Dee had put them back to square one.
The news they received tonight, of the chimpanzee’s unplanned escape and of Upton being tied up and left alone, did not have the same affect on Janet as Dee’s resignation, but they could sense her anger and it scared them. They knew how important it was to her that Upton didn’t get hurt.
“Where is he now?” she demanded, her voice controlled, although she might as well have been shouting. It was a while before someone dared to answer her.
“In the coconut trees, ma’am.”
* * *
A Pair of Brikas
Upton was perspiring so much that it didn’t take him long to slip his hands out of the ropes and then undo his blindfold. Ella Bazaar’s last words to him still rang in his ears. “Save the chimp!” Except now not only did the Pan troglodytes called Maurice need to be saved, but so did its owner.
It took Upton an hour to find his way back to the road, and another two until he reached a small town. The town looked deserted, but he was nevertheless happy to find a town in what seemed to be The Middle of Nowhere. He went to a small building that had a police sign outside, and found a lone sergeant having a mid-afternoon snooze in a corner.
“Pardon! Pardon!” Upton called out excitedly. “My friend has been kidnapped by Tuaregs! It happened not far from here!”
The man didn’t move. Then, without lifting his head, he spoke. Upton could hear he was irritated.
“There is no such thing as a Tuareg here, monsieur. We don’t have enough sand.”
“But I saw them,” Upton replied. “They were there in blue and white, with sabers. And one smelt of beer. And they knocked me over the head with …”
Upton almost choked on his words. The policeman had raised his head far enough for Upton to see that he was wearing sunglasses. And they weren’t just any sunglasses but a pair of angular, Swiss-made Brikas. Bigelow’s words of warning immediately flashed through Upton’s head: “Fthere’s a brand twatch out fer, itsa Brika models. Same kine worn by whirlclass cycliss.”
Upton could almost remember Bigelow’s speech word for word, because he’d made it in a moment of uncharacteristic lucidity.
“Marcel Tuttis, thassa worst,” he’d said. “Edie Amin bought forty pairs whennay firs came out, and Emprah Bokasa was said tav shares inna company. Sept you hardly findem kneemore. But Brikas – I’d think twice bout takin em on, wot.”
Upton’s mind went blank, and whatever he was about to say stuck in his maw. He might as well be trying to get a favor out of The Office of Imports just before closing on a Friday afternoon. And if he’d never been able to win an argument at The Office with a corrupt official in Ray-Bans, he knew he didn’t stand a chance against a pair of Brikas. Nor did he have the time. When he spoke, all that came out was a dry rasp.
“Of c-course. Exactly. N-no Tuaregs.”
Upton started reversing out of the room before the policeman had a chance to summon him back. Not that he knew where he was going to turn next, or whose help he could ask for, but he had to get out of there fast.
Once Upton was gone, the policeman lowered his Brikas and looked after the retreating figure. His eyes, when you saw them, weren’t mean at all. If they showed anything, then it was concern. He pulled out a cell phone and dialed London.
* * *
The Toucan Deal: The Entourage
Felix Magna told his bodyguards that he didn’t want to be disturbed, so they sat in the room downstairs playing cards. They were still annoyed at their boss for not letting them blow up Senor Alvarez’s limousine outside the Scarlet Macaw restaurant. However, Felix Magna had felt safer using people who were familiar with the layout of downtown Tegucigalpa.
“My men have their limitations,” he’d once confided in Jocelyn during one of her visits. She had just complimented her brother on how talented his bodyguards were, although she wasn’t referring to the things they did with their clothes on.
Given his own men’s limitations and their unfamiliarity with the layout of the Honduran capital, Felix had decided to use the three men with big chests. He had gotten their details from Antonio, an acquaintance in Mexico City. Antonio was giving Felix the name of a supplier of Panamanian Gold in Tegucigalpa, when he mentioned in passing that he knew three ex-bouncers in the city who had a variety of talents – nudge, nudge – if he should ever need them.
So, in the end, Felix Magna took both Antonio’s suggestions.
“Here’s to you, Antonio,” he said, raising a joint he’d just rolled, his voice echoing into the room.
Antonio wasn’t really Antonio’s name, but it was what Felix Magna called him. Like the rest of the entourage that followed the scion of Magna Exchange through the nightclubs of Mexico City, Antonio was beautiful and had no identity, at least not one that Felix Magna knew of. And that’s the way he liked to keep it. He had no time for them, and they simply remained his hangers-on. He gave them names of his own choosing. If they reminded him of actors – and most of them did, in a bland kind of way – then he’d refer to them as such. They became Marisa. Or Juliette. Or Kevin.
Antonio, who called to mind a Spanish movie star, was the only one of the entourage who Felix Magna had ever engaged in anything more than a brief conversation. In the weeks after their first meeting, however, something started coming over Felix Magna, and it became more and more obvious to him why he had initially approached Antonio and why he kept going back to him. Felix Magna was in love.
At first Felix Magna thought it was nothing more than the kind of boyhood crush he’d felt for the leader of his gang at boarding school, a thug named Bigs Bigelow. But then he started having dreams about Antonio and waking up in the middle of the night with his shorts damp. The idea that he might love another man scared Felix Magna, because he knew that if his father ever found out, he’d be disinherited as quickly as the old fart could shout ‘Tally-ho!’ To block out his fantasies, Felix Magna smoked more and more marijuana.
“If you’re ever in Tegucigalpa,” Antonio had told Felix that night in Mexico City, “I’ve got some names for you.”
So, for the first time in his life, Felix Magna let lust play a role in his decision-making. Not that he was displeased with the results. The men with big chests had blown up the Mercedes-Benz, Senor Alvarez was virtually eating out of his hand, and he’d already gotten a supply of Panamanian Gold to try out.
Within seconds of taking a drag from the joint, it began to have the desired effect. Felix Magna began smiling, then tittering, and then laughing loud enough for his bodyguards downstairs to hear him. The noise disturbed them so much that they stopped playing cards. It was the same laugh that was said to have made Solomon Magna’s first wife go crazy. The poor woman couldn’t believe she had given birth to such a monstrous-sounding creature.
* * *
The Girl in the Zebra-Print Sarong
“Eh! Cherie!” the young woman called out.
She had nice legs, her knock knees trapped inside a cloth wrap imprinted with a zebra pattern. They were legs just like Pretty Thing’s, a sight that had briefly stirred Upton once upon a time. Before he had reached her mouth, that is. Before Gracie the Nigerian. Before Ella Bazaar. Before La Cité. Before the Bikini Tuaregs. But now he felt nothing.
“Ou tu vas, blanc?” she asked.
“I’m looking for a monkey,” he said, more out of exasperation than because he expected any help from her. In his search for the Pan troglodytes named Maurice, he’d found nothing. He had wandered the back streets of the small town, hoping the policeman in the Brikas hadn’t followed him, wondering at the same time where Ella Bazaar might be. What would the kidnappers do to her? She might be the orphaned child of a circus ringmaster, and she might know how to buy animals at auction to smuggle into Europe, but was she tough enough to endure the Saharan sect? Her very own postcard had said, ‘Beware the Bikini Tuaregs.’
Upton had passed a droguerie, a patisserie, and a café. So far he’d seen dogs, rodents, and a handful of goats, but no monkeys. He felt like Hercules, who’d gone searching in vain for animals to stock Sylvie’s park. But Hercules had been given two weeks, while Upton only had a few hours.
He was standing in the middle of an empty road contemplating where to go next when the girl in the wrap appeared out of nowhere. When Upton told her a second time what he was looking for, she hissed at him like something inhuman. In his anxiety, he was saying sang not singe. He had been asking not for a ‘monkey’ but for ‘blood.’ He quickly corrected himself.
“Ah,” she said encouragingly, “Viens ici, blanc!”
He couldn’t believe it. Was it possible that she had Maurice? Could she have actually found the priceless chimp? Ahead of him the zebra-print-wrapped hips swayed and the knees slapped one another as she walked briskly through the village. She led Upton to a house and then into countless small inner courtyards that made up a kind of maze. In the center courtyard sat a small group of people.
“Tantes, oncles, cherie,” she explained curtly, then left him so that she could consult with two men sitting on an array of mats.
As Upton waited, he noticed something that made his heart sink. The mats they were sitting on were the same kind he had once bought in The Capital – the single item Magna Exchange had accepted from him. But Operation Carpet, as it came to be known, had turned out almost as badly as The Perfume Affair. The container they were being transported in somehow got damp, and the whole consignment of a thousand mats was spoiled by the time the ship docked in Rotterdam. The only pleasant memory Upton had of the ordeal was his ditty: For a third-world reprisal/There’s nothing better than sisal.
One of the seated men was very fat and wore lots of rings. He rose with difficulty and wiggled a bejeweled finger at Upton, who followed him and the girl into another courtyard, where they stopped in front of a pile of garbage. It was only after a while that Upton noticed that behind the heap, tied to a piece of string barely long enough to qualify as a dog leash, there was a creature. Perhaps it was a monkey, but he couldn’t tell because it was busy studying its genitals.
The fat man clapped his hands, whereupon the animal jumped around and looked at the newcomers like a wrestler would an opponent in a ring. On full view, it was even more pitiful than Upton had imagined. A primate of sorts, yes, but it was mangy and had a big welt on its left buttock.
“Attention!” the fat man cried. Then, with the confidence of a magician about to perform some incredible trick, he reached for his pocket. On seeing that gesture, the monkey stood on its head and did a slightly wobbly somersault before falling not onto its feet but its stomach. A belly flop on land instead of on water. As a reward, the fat man threw a few peanuts into the air, which the monkey practically strangled itself trying to reach.
As far as Upton could remember, Maurice didn’t resemble this animal at all. Admittedly, he’d only seen the pan troglodytesin a cage and then, albeit briefly, as it scampered wildly down a dirt road, but he was sure it had looked completely different. Different color, different head, different-shaped buttocks. Would Ella Bazaar be able to tell the difference? What if he was able to dye its hair? Upton was sure he had seen the vendors on Boulevard Kwame Nkrumah in the village selling hair colorant or shoe polish. That would be perfect.
“I’ll take the monkey,” he said.
* * *
The Iguana Deal: The Hurricane
“It won’t be much longer,” the pilot assured the passenger.
Jocelyn Magna wiped the window with her cocktail napkin and looked outside. The small airport building she saw in the distance could have been anywhere in the Pacific or Indian oceans, if only because there were palm trees and sand all around.
“I have to get back to Manila pronto, dammit. It’s a matter of life and death. Get this damn thing in the air or I’ll have your license.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Magna,” the pilot said. “Not until the weather clears.”
Jocelyn peered out the window again.
“I can’t see any hurricane,” she began, then stopped when the stewardess came up behind her and held a bottle over her head threateningly.
“More champagne?”
* * *
Upton Walks a Monkey
Upton was scared of the animal at first. He’d never had a pet since the Chairman had gotten rid of Pépé the Labrador. After taking the leash from the monkey’s owner, he held it gingerly for a while, as if he was convinced the animal might bite him. But once he’d walked it through the town looking for shoe polish or some Revlon, he started getting used to it. The monkey seemed to be as tame as a dog.
“You’re all right,” Upton concluded.
The town had by this stage come alive with vendors and people loaded down with bags, all heading off in the same direction with a sense of urgency. At one point Upton heard a high-pitched cry, and he thought one of them might have stepped on the monkey. He stopped, turned around and looked at the creature, but then he heard the noise again. Then he realized it wasn’t the plaintive cry of an animal he’d heard, but the whistle of a train.
* * *
The Disappearing Magnas
“Where are those two?” Solomon Magna put it to Goodleigh, even though his assistant, as usual, wasn’t meant to answer him. “Off competing with each other again, I’m sure. What was it they came up with the last time?”
Now Goodleigh was meant to answer.
“A chemical waste disposal company and an asbestos factory,” he said, his voice emotionless.
For a moment Solomon Magna reflected in the glow of those two acquisitions. He sighed contentedly. At least he could say that two of his children did him proud.
“Yes, that was it. Why can’t Upton be more like them? They remind me of my father and my uncle, always trying to outdo one another.”
Goodleigh nodded, but he knew it wasn’t true. Solomon Magna’s father had been a poor filing clerk as well as an only child. The Chairman of Magna Exchange didn’t have an uncle, and the one he did speak of was as fake as the portrait of Mortimer on his office wall.
* * *
The Fantastic Story of the Jungle Woman
There was so much commotion going on around the train, so much wind and sand blowing from an approaching storm, that none of the passengers noticed Upton had a monkey on a leash. Besides, the other travelers had animals of their own, live chickens tied up by their legs in bunches, and skinned goat carcasses they were dragging down the corridors. The trails of blood made Upton queasy.
If the passengers were distracted by anything, it wasn’t an animal but a person. Upton saw them whispering to each other excitedly about one of their fellow travelers. He couldn’t see who it was, because the person in question was being guarded by half a dozen men who stood around him and created a human shield. The men all wore wraparound sunglasses with reflective lenses, a style that would have been more suitable on a Swiss ski slope in daytime than on an African train at dusk. The eyewear put Upton on edge.
“I wouldn’t look at them for too long,” someone near Upton said.
A man in his fifties, wearing a pair of bifocals and a colorful morning robe thrown over his right shoulder, removed the books piled on the seat next to him so that Upton could sit down. The monkey lay obediently at Upton’s feet and stayed there even when the men in ski glasses started shouting at curious passengers that got too close to whoever it was they were protecting.
“As I said,” the teacher repeated to Upton, “I wouldn’t stare if I were you. He apparently doesn’t like it.”
“Who is ‘he’?” Upton asked curiously.
“There are rumors. A politician. A guerrilla leader. A holy man.” He neatened the pleats in his robe while he talked. “Every person you ask tells you something else. It’s hard to know.”
“Have you seen him?”
“They say it’s safer not to.”
“Why?”
“I have heard that anyone who looks at him the wrong way – and there seems to be no right way – pays the price.”
Upton raised his eyebrows.
“As for people who dare to cross him …” The man swallowed. “Well, you can imagine.”
The train shook and rattled, then it began to move. The faster they went, the more noise and clanking that came from under their carriage. The monkey, curled into a ball, was nuzzling Upton’s feet.
“One story about him has become quite famous,” the teacher said conspiratorially.
The metallic scraping noises below his seat bothered Upton, so he tried to ignore them by paying attention to the teacher.
“And what was that?”
The teacher looked up every now and then to check the guards.
“It seems that he was in the north of the country – trading, fighting, who knows what? – when a commercial plane crashed in his territory. Only one person was on the plane and, miraculously, survived. A woman, apparently.”
“Good heavens.”
“Nobody knows what was being transported. But there are strong indications what it was.”
Upton was sure he knew.
“Guns, right? It must have been guns.”
The teacher shook his head.
“Wild creatures.”
Upton suddenly wasn’t paying attention to the unhealthy noises the train was making.
“Animals?” he asked.
“Yes indeed,” the stranger answered. “Even though most indigenous animals in the area had been slaughtered long ago by guerrillas, there were lots of them around the crash site.”
“So they had been on the plane?” Upton suggested.
“Quite possibly.”
Upton suddenly thought of something. Animals on a plane plus a lone woman flying that plane? Could the pilot have been Ella Bazaar?
“And the woman?” Upton asked. “What happened to her?”
“She was taken hostage,” the teacher said, nodding slightly in the direction of the guarded passenger. “Apparently, he took such a liking to her that he tried to make her his mistress.”
Upton’s mouth dropped open.
“What did he do to her?”
The teacher shrugged.
“No one knows but the two of them.”
“And then?”
“It seems that one of the junior men was also smitten by her, and he was convinced that if he helped her, she would be his. So one night he led her away, planning to hide her somewhere.”
Upton kept thinking of Ella Bazaar. Could it really have been her?
“A day later, however, the soldier limped back into camp, a beaten man. His leader was so enraged by her escape that he made her capture a priority. Seeing they were in such impenetrable forest, and it was all controlled by his men, he was sure it wouldn’t take long to get her back.”
“Did they find.…” Upton started to say Ella Bazaar’s name, but stopped. “Did they find the woman?”
“She got away. No one knows how. Some say it was the birds that led her, or the beasts migrating, that they showed her the way. But I think it is impossible.”
“Maybe a lion could have eaten her,” Upton suggested, half hoping that the woman hadn’t been Ella Bazaar.
The teacher shifted in his seat.
“That remains a possibility. But a month later, something very strange happened.”
Upton was still trying to take in the story he’d just heard.
“A plane flew directly over the same guerrilla camp. It came very low, dangerously low considering there were men below shooting at it. But this pilot knew exactly where to go. At the last possible moment, a huge load was dropped onto the camp.”
“How do you know it was her?” Upton asked. “The woman he’d kept hostage, I mean.”
“The cargo had her mark on it.”
“What was it?”
“Two tons of elephant dung.”
* * *
Good Advice from a Bad Man
“Imagination, that’s the key,” Solomon Magna used to exhort Upton after the tragic death of his mother.
The young boy, without her wonderful stories to soothe him to sleep and without Pépé by his side, would lie awake at night. Solomon Magna, chewing on his cigar as he paced up and down the nursery, told him to think of something else besides his mother. Upton began to cry and said he couldn’t. “Use your imagination,” the Chairman said, then closed the door and left the child alone in the darkness.
* * *
A Very Intricate Plan
“Why can’t we tell him the whole story?” she asked. “Surely he would understand then.”
It was a question Ella Bazaar would ask Janet several times over the course of many months of preparation. Janet would never respond immediately, but when she did she was always firm about what they had to do. She knew that Ella Bazaar would be alone in Africa with Upton, and she couldn’t risk the young woman having any doubts about her mission. Everything could fall apart so easily if she didn’t follow the plan.
“If Solomon Magna even gets the slightest wind of this,” Janet explained, “we won’t stand a chance. He’ll move fast. And he won’t go through with the transfer.”
Ella Bazaar shook her head. “You think Upton would tell him – after all his father’s done to him?”
Janet wasn’t sure what Upton would do.
“He doesn’t know how bad his father is,” she answered. “Besides, there’s too much at stake now. And there’s not that much time either. We have to carry on as planned. For all of us. For the animals. For Upton.” Janet paused. “He’ll understand,” she added, although she wondered whether he really would.
* * *
The Murderous Berry Fineman
The more Upton thought about it, the more convinced he was that it had been Ella Bazaar who’d bombed the guerrillas with dung. It all added up. The animals. The cargo plane flying north. She was capable of doing something like that. Hadn’t the trio in the Grand Marché told him that she was the best in the business? If anyone would have been able to escape from such a terrible prison in the jungle, it was Ella Bazaar. Despite himself, Upton couldn’t help feeling proud of her.
“Then again,” the teacher said, looking through the train window even though it was pitch black outside, “it could all just be a story, a complete fabrication.”
Upton unthinkingly scratched the head of the monkey at his feet, his earlier trepidation already forgotten.
“She must be the one he’s after then,” Upton said, looking toward the mystery man who was being protected by his ski-glassed henchmen.
The teacher nodded gravely.
Upton suddenly feared for Ella Bazaar. She had not only the Bikini Tuaregs to deal with, but the mystery man too.
“Does he have a name?” Upton asked.
“Roberto Bonhomme,” the teacher whispered, so low that even Upton could hardly hear him. “But people call him something else.”
Upton waited for him to tell him what it was.
“Berry Fineman.”
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